Invisible monsters 2021 series#

Even when the event itself didn’t appear, planes, crumbling buildings, and fire were constant tropes. Barrett told me that, when a crisis isn’t associated with specific memorable images, “one disaster will show up as another.” In contrast, dreams that she studied in the aftermath of 9/11 were, for example, quite closely tied to reality.

To place the motifs they were getting from respondents into the context of the field of dream research, the filmmakers consulted Deirdre Barrett, an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard and the author of “ Pandemic Dreams.” The filmmakers latched onto a phenomenon that Barrett has identified as “invisible monsters,” stand-ins that crop up in place of COVID-19 in anxiety dreams. Borrello described the process as like being “a detective with wires on a board, finding the themes that connect and then whittling it down.” These ranged from small oddities that cropped up repeatedly, like lizards and childhood acquaintances, to broader tropes, like experiences of physical touch tinged with danger.

In order to counter that phenomenon, they focussed on teasing out concepts that ran through multiple dreams, in an effort to glean something universal, despite the disparate experiences of dreamers in countries with very different responses to the pandemic. Listening to a dream can be “exhausting,” LaCerte said, because it’s typically a “whole big narrative,” with details that are only relevant to one person’s subconscious. LaCerte told me that, throughout the process, the filmmakers kept in mind the fact that dreams recounted in the light of day tend to be less than riveting. They combed through the more than eighty responses they received, looking for interview subjects with visually compelling dreams, eventually narrowing the list down to twenty, from respondents spanning five continents. They had been experiencing vivid and odd dreams since going into lockdown, and began collecting ones from others, solicited through social media, Reddit, survey sites, and from their own acquaintances. The idea for the film arose during the early weeks of the pandemic, when the three filmmakers were, like many people, catching up via video call.

Invisible monsters 2021 series#

LaCerte animated the dream, along with a series of others, for the film above, “Invisible Monsters and Tomato Soup,” produced by Stevie Borrello and Meghan McDonough. The scene brought on a familiar panic the classic dream distress of being naked in public, with the faux pas updated to fit pandemic life.

One night in May of last year, the animator Marcie LaCerte dreamed that she found herself in the middle of a crowded Gap without a face mask.